Charles Deuel was one of five druggists in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1870. Born in New York, he moved to Amherst and married a local girl, perhaps after being a student in Amherst. They lived in a home on Prospect Street that faced down Maple Street. All of the druggists in the 19th and early 20th century mixed their own drugs using formulae that were derived from the standard texts of the day and chemicals and compounds that were commercially available. The bottles they used, too, were sold to them through commercial routes. This bottle, for example, was probably made by the Whitehall Tatum Glass Company, originally located in San Francisco but which later relocated to New York. Deuel's drug store on South Pleasant Street was the site of one of Amherst's first telephones, installed in December, 1882 by the Western Massachusetts Telephone Company.